I’ve had very little contact with my department this semester and have been neglecting my academic duties to finish this novel; I feel like I’m taking off one suit of clothes after another, scattering them around me until they are completely shed and I leap into the sun. To land in Spain.

Something is shifting. I can’t tell if this means I have left the academy in my heart, or if it’s just the usual shift of coming to the end of a project. Either way I keep falling out of voice contact with people, I get surprised by how many kinds of light there are in the world, inexistents upset me, I get the old urge to drink coffee and stay up until dawn. I pace the house and don’t clean. I write these posts.

Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.